This book is based on my experiences as a teacher and as a researcher for more than four decades. When I started teaching in the early 1950s, I became interested in the vibrations of plates and shells. Soon after I joined the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn as a professor, I began working busily on my research in vibrations of sandwich and layered plates and shells, and then teaching a graduate course on the same subject. Although I tried to put together my lecture notes into a book, I never finished it. Many years later, I came to the New Jersey Institute of Technology as the dean of engineering. When I went back to teaching and looked for some research areas to work on, I came upon laminated composites and piezoelectric layers, which appeared to be natural extensions of sandwiches. Working on these for the last several years has brought me a great deal of joy, since I still am able to find my work relevant. At least I can claim that I still am pursuing life-long learning as it is advocated by educators all over the country. This book is based on the research results I accumulated during these two periods of my work, the first on vibrations and dynamical model ing of sandwiches, and the second on laminated composites and piezoelec tric layers.

This book by the late R D Mindlin is destined to become a classic introduction to the mathematical aspects of two-dimensional theories of elastic plates. It systematically derives the two-dimensional theories of anisotropic elastic plates from the variational formulation of the three-dimensional theory of elasticity by power series expansions. The uniqueness of two-dimensional problems is also examined from the variational viewpoint. The accuracy of the two-dimensional equations is judged by comparing the dispersion relations of the waves that the two-dimensional theories can describe with prediction from the three-dimensional theory. Discussing mainly high-frequency dynamic problems, it is also useful in traditional applications in structural engineering as well as provides the theoretical foundation for acoustic wave devices.

This work presents a unified approach to the vibrations of elastic systems as applied to MEMS devices, mechanical components, and civil structures. Applications include atomic force microscopes, energy harvesters, and carbon nanotubes and consider such complicating effects as squeeze film damping, viscous fluid loading, in-plane forces, and proof mass interactions with their elastic supports. These effects are analyzed as single degree-of-freedom models and as more realistic elastic structures. The governing equations and boundary conditions for beams, plates, and shells with interior and boundary attachments are derived by applying variational calculus to an expression describing the energy of the system. The advantages of this approach regarding the generation of orthogonal functions and the Rayleigh-Ritz method are demonstrated. A large number of graphs and tables are given to show the impact of various factors on the systems’ natural frequencies, mode shapes, and responses.

With increasingly sophisticated structures involved in modern engineering, knowledge of the complex vibration behavior of plates, shells, curved membranes, rings, and other complex structures is essential for today‘s engineering students, since the behavior is fundamentally different than that of simple structures such as rods and beams. Now in its

With Over 60 tables, most with graphic illustration, and over 1000 formulas, Formulas for Dynamics, Acoustics, and Vibration will provide an invaluable time-saving source of concise solutions for mechanical, civil, nuclear, petrochemical and aerospace engineers and designers. Marine engineers and service engineers will also find it useful for diagnosing their machines that can slosh, rattle, whistle, vibrate, and crack under dynamic loads.